Ransacking The Archive: The Lonely Potato Farmer

Ms. Modigliani flatly rejected the idea of wintering in Monaco after reading about Princess Caroline’s lost poem. “So now you’re sending poems to princesses?”

“That was thirty years ago. I told you about that.”

“You tell me lots of things. I don’t take it seriously until I see it in writing.”

She was equally dubious in the early days of our courtship when I told her this poem was written with her in mind. Maybe she”ll believe me now.

The Lonely Potato Farmer

Some people scrub them compulsively
paring them down to perfect
cubes of starch, 300 calories, no butter.
I like to hold them in my hand, judging
the heft and lump of body parts.
This one could be a fist,
that one a heart or monkey’s brain.
Every October I dig deeper in the furrow
hoping to unearth one as big as the brain
of a French philosophe
Voltaire, maybe, or Georges Cuvier.
Imagine a dirt-caked Katahdin
or Red Lakota as smug and capacious
as the mind of René Descartes.
It thinks, therefore we’ll eat it.
I find a few more of the secretive ones,
overlooked and unmarketable,
next year’s seed. Like my testicles,
I think, washing each gently before
dropping it, unchopped, into the stew.
On long winter nights I linger over
potato bins in the market. When no one’s
watching I lift 20-lb. mesh bags
to smell Idaho, Michigan, Maine
to remember that hot morning in June
when you stopped my heart and held my gaze
with the simplest pale flowers and the promise
of shimmering, salted skin
as you slipped from your sun dress.

Maybe, like the Stones song we danced to on the night we met, it was just my imagination running away with me. Maybe not.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]